1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to marine vessel design.
2. Prior Art
Ocean-going vessels and, in general, watercrafts, rely on three methods to negotiate the surface on water bodies:                1) “DISPLACEMENT”: this method is used by vessels with displacement hulls that will remain always partially immersed. The energy supplied by the power plant is transferred, by means of propellers or water jets, to the water that has to be moved to permit the forward motion of the vessel.        2) “PLANING”: this method is used by vessels with planing hulls. In these vessels the energy from the power plant is used to lift the hull out of the water. This is achieved with a bottom design that presents a hydrodynamically lifting surface to the water: the upward force thus generated at planing speed, is sufficient to lift the vessel partially out of the water. This reduces the wetted surface of the hull and the amount of water that has to be displaced to allow forward motion.        3) “PIERCING”: this method has been used recently to design vessels capable of high speed in rough waters and is used chiefly in catamarans. In this design, the hulls are very narrow and have very sharp bows; this permits the vessel to go through the waves with reduced resistance.        
It is interesting to note that in all of these conventional designs, there is a kind of violence that is done to the waves, a disruption of the natural flow of the water in motion that limits the attainable speed for a given power plant and vessel length. Most importantly, conventional designs subject the mechanical structure of the vessel to tremendous impacts as the speed is increased. These impacts create stresses in the materials that require additional strength, and thus weight, to be added to the design of the vessel. As a consequence, power has to be increased, with further increase in weight and so on. Range, which implies fuel weight, is also a parameter that is influenced by wave disruption: for this reason, fast vessels of limited size have generally limited range.